My hobby is linguistics. I've begun a small project that will be able to analyze syllables in a format that is friendly to Optimality Theory, a moderately recent theory in phonology.

Before the main project is started, however, I hope to work on Unicode/IPA libraries usable for most linguists. Mainly, it will be tables of data about which symbols are associated with which sound features, cross-references to Sil-IPA, and many other things.

Ultimately, I would like to use it to translate words from phonetically predictable languages (i.e. those languages where you can predict the approximate sound of the word based on the spelling and a "standard accent"), like Russian, German, and Basque.

These words could then be fed into the Optimality Engine, and tableaux could be spit out, representing constraint rankings, how borrowings are treated, and many more things.

Mainly, I want to be lazy and have a computer generate the tableaux, rather than me having to do it in a spreadsheet program. I also want that laziness to spread to other linguists.